Amen to that! Same thing could be said for MySQL vs Postgres benchmarks. I've been doing some research on the two and I have to say people at the SliceHost forum suggest that MySQL can rival Postgres if you turn off certain modules (like skipping InnoDB).
Not true - MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL, but PGSQL is faster under load.
What's being argued here is that there are no technical grounds for one application to be faster than the other - they're just sendfile() whatever is requested of them, which doesn't leave much room for speed differentiation.
On the other hand, database engines are very complicated beasts that do tons of stuff, each in their own way. There's lots of room for one to be faster or slower than the other depending on how they're designed, how they go about accomplishing something, and the tasks they're optimized for; in contrast with web servers where they all do the same basic task using the very same algorithms and APIs (for the most).
